I’m holding the dress slightly away from my body, afraid of putting fingerprints on it. “How did you even know my size?”
“Let’s just say I had a long, good look at you the night we met,” he says, perfectly relaxed.
“Is that so?” I ask in a sultry voice. “I’m impressed you remember, given how beautifully impaired you were by those sleeping chocolates.”
“Oh, I have an excellent memory,” he says, low. “... for things worth remembering.”
I have to squeeze my hands into fists to keep from perfuming and fucking him right on his bed.Fuck, that’s hot.
“Well then.” He stands, and suddenly the room is full of him. “Grab your coat. We’re not doing research cooped up in a hotel room like fugitives.”
“Where does one research a millionaire, if not a nice hotel room?” I ask.
“Somewhere with éclairs,” he says, already holding the door. “Obviously.”
***
The café two blocks down is all marble and brass, bright afternoon light streaming through the front window in wide, warm stripes, and a pastry case the size of a pool table. Ash installs me at a corner table with my pick of the case and a coffee, takes the seat with his back to the wall, and slides the orchard’s laptop across the marble.
What I learn about Warren Holt in two hours and one cinnamon twist:
He’s fourty-five-ish, an alpha out of no money at all, and he has given the same origin story to every trade publication that would sit still for it: one failing cocktail bar, rebuilt by hand, then another, then an empire. His self-made-ness is in the first paragraph of everything ever written about him. He funds brands suddenly, completely, and always with a story attached. And in fourteen interviews, nine podcast appearances, and one keynote I watch at double speed with my earbuds in, a pattern keeps surfacing, quiet and consistent, interview after interview.
Every single brand he’s ever backed, he found. The bottled negroni he noticed at a wedding. The mezcal he ordered by accident in Oaxaca. He tells each story the same way—the stumble, the discovery, the “I knew before anyone knew”.
I don’t take pitches. I take walks,I read.
Hmm, I guess it means he lets discoveries happen organically...
“He can’t be pitched,” I say slowly. “Pitching him is how you lose. Everything he’s ever invested in, he says he discovered.”
“Uh.” Ash sets his cup down. “So we don’t pitch?”
“No,” I say, flipping to a clean page on the legal pad. “We figure out how to make him discover us.”
32
Ash
“You know,” Luna says, chin propped on her knuckles, “most humans blink once in a while.”
“So do I.” I blink once, slow, smirking.
“But you’re still staring.” Her hand makes a small circle below her neckline, right where my gaze has taken up residence.
“Multitasking,” I say, and drag my eyes up to hers, slow. “Someone has to keep an eye on the most dangerous things in the room.”
She levels the librarian look at me over the rim of her glass, but the corner of her mouth has already lost the fight.
In my defense: the dress. It molds her breasts perfectly, and the emerald green against porcelain skin and ink-dark hair ought to come with a warning label. When she stepped out of our bathroom two hours ago, I swear she erased the English language straight out of my head.
I’ve recovered maybe half my vocabulary since. Inconvenient, given that tonight we need to sell a very rich man on our cider without ever once pitching it, and I’m going to need every word I own.
“Earth to Ash.” She’s smiling. “Anyone in there?”
“No.” There are lines for this. I know a hundred of them, and not one survives contact. “You’re the most breathtaking person I’ve ever seen.”
It comes out with no polish on it at all. Her breath catches, quick.
